Amazon is planning a new wave of layoffs, sources say

Two sources said luck Amazon’s human resources department — known internally as PXT, or the People eXperience Technology team — will be hit hard, but other areas of Amazon’s core consumer business are also likely to be affected. It was not possible to know the number of employees that Amazon plans to lay off, nor the exact timing of the cuts.

The company laid off relatively small numbers of employees earlier this year in areas such as its consumer hardware unit, its Wondery audio streaming division, and Amazon Web Services.

Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel declined to comment.

Amazon’s PXT division, which reports to Senior Vice president Beth Galletti, has more than 10,000 employees worldwide and includes a large recruiting team, as well as technology staff and other traditional HR roles.

The new cuts come as Amazon continues to look for ways to cut employee costs while investing aggressively in AI products and infrastructure — both for internal use and for sale to enterprise customers. The company said it plans to spend more than $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, as it builds its cloud and artificial intelligence data centers.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy already oversaw the largest layoffs in the company’s history from late 2022 into 2023, when the company cut at least 27,000 corporate jobs, representing a high-single-digit percentage of the company’s office jobs. Many other major technology companies also reduced their headcount around that time as the pandemic eased and consumer demand trends changed.

Now, many employers are looking to harness the power of AI — initially for mundane, repetitive tasks and eventually for more complex jobs — to reduce the need to maintain the same level of human employees on their payrolls.

Gacy himself is one of them. The CEO fired a warning shot to his employees in June, when he encouraged them to welcome this new era of AI.

“Those who embrace this change, become AI-savvy, and help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver services to customers will be well-positioned to make a significant impact and help us reinvent the company,” he wrote in a company-wide email that was also posted on Amazon’s corporate blog.

Meanwhile, Jassy also noted that there won’t be room on the bus for everyone: “We expect this to reduce the company’s overall workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI more widely across the company.”

Jassy, ​​who succeeded Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, has developed a reputation as a cost-cutter (although to be fair, he inherited a company that many say has become wasteful and bloated in some areas). Amazon executives regularly ask managers to meet a certain percentage target for non-unfortunate attrition, or URA—essentially a percentage of employees that the company is okay with losing, whether through voluntary departure, through “management,” or through formal layoffs. But the sources said luck These reductions are discussed internally differently than the typical URA process.

While Amazon plans to lay off employees from corporate roles, the company announced its typical holiday hiring spree of warehouse employees on Tuesday. This year, the company will hire 250,000 seasonal employees across its warehouses and logistics networks in the United States.

Amazon’s share price is down just over 1% this calendar year, but is 15% higher than it was 12 months ago. The company will announce its earnings later this month.

Are you a current or former Amazon employee and have thoughts on this topic or advice to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondillery@protonmail.comor through the Signal and WhatsApp messaging applications on 917-655-4267. You can also contact him On LinkedIn Or in @Dealry on X and @jdelrey on Threads and on Bluesky.